ART REVIEW : LEGRADY: SEE WHAT AMERICA IS SAYING

George Legrady’s photographs and sculptures explore the language of received information, the means by which mass media, and the corporate establishment, manages to institutionalize certain language systems and propagate them as irrefutable dogma.

This has become a common and often predictable subject for many post-conceptual artists, emanating in part from the work of John Baldessari, as well as the more scholarly researches of linguistic academia.

Legrady’s current exhibit at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions through Sunday is divided into two self-contained segments. “Posing” is a series of three photographic triptychs composed of enlarged snapshots that date from the 1960s. The images derive from a pair of family albums that Legrady bought at a swap meet. One belonged to a GI and presents images of Vietnam, the other portrays two Tennessee sisters who live in a trailer park.

Legrady shows how visual language is transformed when an intimate remembrance becomes a public spectacle. Just as we are obviously voyeurs as a gallery audience, we also become aware that before the camera we act according to predetermined rites. Both the men and the women, despite completely different environments and groupings, tend to be passively playing roles and creating gestures that seem to be expected of them.

Legrady deftly juggles of existing information to score ideological points, but his work fails to provide any deeper resonance. This is particularly underlined in “Studies for Monuments,” three painted cardboard cutout vignettes that represent “subversive” proposals for official monuments. “Architectural Proposal for the 1988 Olympic Pavilion Entrance” consists of a post and lintel structure framed by two walls, one in blue proclaiming “No” for the U.S. in 1980, the other in red inscribed “Nyet” for the Soviets (1984).

An amusing debunking of the architecture of official diarrhea certainly, but neither very subtle nor incisive. The establishment works in far more insidious ways than this.